CJ, all of your assertions are based on government having the foresight that matches your 20/20 hindsight. No room to simply let the free market do its thing. For example, you said about oil shale:
> Coal gasification, oil shale and oil sands were being researched. That all stopped when the plug, well, you know. ... Oil shales have problems. Needless to say, when we stopped doing the research, nothing much has happened. No huge surprise.
The reality, from Wiki:
en.wikipedia.org
> Although the Estonian and Chinese oil shale industries continued to grow after World War II, most other countries abandoned their projects due to high processing costs and the availability of cheaper petroleum.[6][2][25][28] Following the 1973 oil crisis, world production of oil shale reached a peak of 46 million tonnes in 1980 before falling to about 16 million tonnes in 2000, due to competition from cheap conventional petroleum in the 1980s.[19][9] On 2 May 1982, known as "Black Sunday", Exxon canceled its US$5 billion Colony Shale Oil Project near Parachute, Colorado, laying off more than 2,000 workers and leaving a trail of home-foreclosures and small-business bankruptcies.[29] This led the United States Congress to abolish its Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program.[30]
> The global oil shale industry began to revive in the mid-1990s. In 2003, an oil shale development program restarted in the United States. Authorities introduced a commercial leasing program permitting the extraction of oil shale and tar sand resources on federal lands in 2005, in accordance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.[31][32][33]
Meanwhile I can provide links that both support and reject your assertion that solar was a "one billion dollar per year industry until the GOP pulled the plug":
motherjones.com
energybulletin.net
No surprise that the link supporting your assertion comes from Mother Jones ...
The point is that you're passing off a lot of left-wing arguments as foregone conclusions, when the debate is still up in the air.
Tenchusatsu |
